The Second Hit

When the justice system betrays the survivors it’s supposed to protect

Author and her daughter at Disneyland in Sept 1998 shortly after finding out she was pregnant with her abuser’s child. Author provided photo.

TW: DV, SA

After my first husband “Brad” pleaded guilty to child abuse in criminal and juvenile court, I thought it would mean something. I truly thought I would finally be seen. See? This is what I’ve been living with. He admits it. This man is unstable. He’s violent.

He held a pillow over my two year old daughter’s face (his step daughter), hard enough to bruise her cheek and cause broken blood vessels up and down her neck, so she would “shut up”. But “she never lost consciousness.” So I guess there’s that. The abuse started small, early incidents spread out over months. Over the year we were together they escalated. I would find out later the pillow thing was his signature move.

When he finally admitted to me what he’d done — only because I was going to take her to the doctor since I couldn’t understand where the markings on her face and neck had come from — he apologized profusely, telling me he knew he was an awful person. He punched himself in the face multiple times “as punishment”. Obviously it was not genuine, it was just the way he’d learned he was most likely to be forgiven and still given access to his victims.

Family court saw his guilty plea as his willingness to take responsibility for his actions. I knew him better than that. “Taking responsibility” is his way of escaping punishment for his actions. And it works like a charm. It seems to me that if he’d done this to someone else’s child he’d be charged with attempted murder, but keep it in the family and he’s good.

Family court takes on the same stance as every other bystander to domestic violence — I don’t want to get involved. That’s between you two. Stop airing your dirty laundry in public. You’re making us uncomfortable.

I had to give the victim’s statement at Brad’s criminal sentencing. I told the judge that this man had a history of violence and that he wasn’t going to change even if he seemed contrite in court.

The judge said, “I guess time will tell,” and then proceeded to give him a slap on the wrist.

It was already insulting enough that Brad was only given 90 days of house arrest with a tracking device, one year of probation, and one year of supervised visits with our daughter, but when I found out he never completed the 90 days of house arrest I called to find out why.

Author and daughter who was suffocated by her step dad before the abuse in summer 1998. Author provided photo.

That part of the sentencing never made it into the paper record. I ordered a video tape of the sentencing hearing. I knew I wasn’t crazy. That had been the only part of the punishment that felt like an actual punishment. It was the only piece that felt like it would matter to him.

I watched the video. It was there — though it was after the judge had made some remarks about something else. So basically the court clerk had missed it because she had stopped listening after the judge went off on a tangent.

I told the court what had happened. They told me they weren’t going to reopen the record. So Brad never even had to complete his 90 days of house arrest because of a court clerk error.

For all the pain and suffering he put my two daughters and me through, he was punished with one year of probation and one year of supervised visits with our daughter.

The fallout

The supervised visits with my daughter went off swimmingly. Because of course they did. What was he going to do? Beat her in the playroom where he spent one hour a week with people and cameras monitoring his every move? The supervisors all gave him high marks — “Behaves appropriately” — and after that short year (she was two by then) he was allowed to have full minimum standard visitation — every other weekend and Wednesday evenings. He probably could have gotten more, but he didn’t want it. Thank God. He never bonded with our daughter, he simply needed to keep her around to control me.

In the week leading up to her visits with him, she would get anxious. She would have full meltdowns and temper tantrums. She would tell me she wasn’t going, and I would cry with her because there was nothing else I could do. He has another daughter, who is three years older than our daughter, so they at least had each other.

Some weekends went off without incident. Some weekends she came home with stories of emotional abuse and distress. Occasionally a grabbed wrist or a push. Often without completing the required care for her cystic fibrosis (oral and inhaled medications, ThAIRapy Vest, nightly g-tube tube feeds and oxygen supplementation). But I’d already been through the courts. I knew if there were no broken bones they wouldn’t care. So she was forced to suffer through it. She was never allowed to call me when she was with him.

Easter 1999. This is the couch the abuser threw at the author mentioned in this story. Author provided photo.

If you’ve been there, you know what I’m talking about. The courts tie your hands. As a mother, you were given the innate need to make sure your children are safe. But then the courts tell you if you don’t send them into a pit of vipers you’ll go to jail and lose custody. I’m one of the lucky ones. My daughter made it out alive, though certainly not unscathed. At 27, she’s literally never dated because she’s terrified of men. Honestly, that’s probably the best case scenario.

Meanwhile I’d hear stories of abuse to his third wife and her children. After me, Brad married a woman from Mexico. She was afraid of the police, so she would never call them. I’m sure that’s no coincidence. He got in fist fights with her sons. Locked them all out of the house. In general, he continued his reign of terror.

He is a grandiose narcissist who is also an abuser. A deadly combination. After I left him, he came to my house one night “wanting to talk”. I wouldn’t answer the door. As I recall, I was on the phone with my grandma. He kept pounding. I eventually called the police. They didn’t show up until long after he’d gone home. They went and “had a talk with him”. He told me afterwards, “They don’t call it crimes of passion for nothing.”

When things changed

Eventually I remarried. My new husband was in the military. He was a fighter. And he scared the s*** out of Brad. Brad could only pick on women and children. He cowered when my new husband would stand behind me, arms folded, every time he “needed to talk”. Our daughter was almost five when I remarried. I had lived in near constant fear of him until then.

When my daughter was 11 she told her dad she didn’t want to go to his house one weekend. Surprisingly, he agreed. As I mentioned, he never truly bonded with her and now that I had my military husband, I just wasn’t as much fun to pick on anymore. One weekend turned into two. Which turned into three years. I think he truly believed that she would “come to her senses”.

She did not. She was grateful to get away from him.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t done with us. When she was 14, he took me to court charging that I was withholding his visitation. The judge asked why he hadn’t come three years earlier — the first time anyone in any court said something that made sense. I thought at 14, with my daughter’s own account of her father’s abuse, as well as his criminal history, they’d let her off the hook. They did not. In my state — officially — the child has no say until they are 18.

Author shortly after leaving her abuser in Dec 1999, trying to get her life back on track with no help from the courts. Author provided photo.

She was court ordered to attend counseling with her father. And he got to pick the counselor (so much for the judge making sense). The counselor would decide when overnight visits were appropriate to start up again.

This prospect was terrifying to me because, if you’ve ever been with a narcissist, you know about their uncanny way of getting new people “on their side”. I knew exactly where this was going. My daughter was terrified of the therapist as well as her father. She barely participated in the sessions, she even stormed out on one occasion because they were “ganging up on her”.

But eventually the day still came when the therapist decided they were ready for a weekend visit. When Brad came to pick her up, though, she refused to get in the car. So he called the police.

Unofficially — the police told me, they will not pick up a teenage child and put them in the back of the other parent’s car kicking and screaming. So, in effect, my daughter had to be so terrified and traumatized that she was having a full blown meltdown as a teenager to advocate for her own safety.

What.The.Actual.F***.

The happy? ending

After that day, her dad finally backed off. I still lived in fear until she was officially 18, but I guess he took the hint.

I heard recently that he’s “changed”. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, but I can tell you this: If I was an abusive a**hole who scared my children and wives so traumatically that they would push the couch up against the door at night in fear that I might try to break in, and I finally “saw the light”, the first thing I would do is pick up the phone and beg for their forgiveness.

As you can imagine, this has never happened.

I’m 46 now, which means he’s going to be 58 next month. The truth is that he’s too old to fully participate in his own shenanigans. He hasn’t “changed” he’s simply aged out.

You can read more of our story here:

[embed]The Words My Attorney Said to Me as We Left Court Have Stayed with me Since 1999 He wanted to know why “pretty girls like me” always choose creeps like my exlongafterthethrill.medium.com

There is no way this man is not a danger to society any longer.

This same man worked for the federal government and had to have Homeland Security called on him when he was raging at work. This same man strangled and suffocated his first wife. He also pulled her out of the shower and kicked her with hiking boots, screaming something unintelligible about his mother, while foaming at the mouth (he always foamed at the mouth while he raged).

When confronted, his first wife chose fight, from her options of fight, flight, fawn, or freeze. It almost got her killed. I chose fawn. It probably saved me more times than I know.

After giving birth to his child and having a full front to back episiotomy, he raped his first wife because she wouldn’t perform oral for him during the six week postpartum abstinence mandate.

She didn’t tell me this story — he did.

And when I asked in horror, “You raped your wife?” He said with his full chest, “You can’t rape your wife.”

The story had the desired effect. After giving birth to our daughter I toed the line.

This same man got into a road rage incident. He and the driver of the other car both pulled over. Unfortunately for Brad, this time it was a man, and that man beat the s*** out of Brad on the side of the freeway. But even that didn’t change him, he simply signed himself up for martial arts training.

So no, he hasn’t “changed”. He’s not suddenly a safe person. He’s simply too old to keep up his regimen of tormenting women and children.

And the courts heard all that and thought, “Yep, this girl needs her dad.”

Author with her two daughters in 2003, three years after her divorce was final. Author provided photo.

[embed]*Post-Separation Abuse of Women and their Children: Boundary-setting and Family Court Utilization among Victimized Mothers *Continued abuse of themselves and their children is a concern for many mothers leaving intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrating husbands. This research examines women's responses to abuse committed by ex-husbands with whom they had undergone ... share.google

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I’ve always had a passion for writing, so a warm thank you for reading to the end. Comments, shares, saves, and tips appreciated.

I have turned my rough beginnings as a teenaged welfare mom into motivation to get educated (B.S., M.S.) and into a successful career. Now the mother of four adults, and grandmother of two littles, I work in Corporate America but write blog style articles on the many things I’ve learned about Relationships, Sex, Money, and Life in general mostly for my own healing.

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